Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Sick and Tired, 6 Week Edition

Perhaps you are clicking around, looking for election hot takes. I'm sorry I haven't got anything for you; I did all my hot-taking on Facebook last Tuesday, and since then I've been watching the reactions. It's not very pretty. Lots of zealous people out there who feel that their obvious passion for righteousness exempts them from the burden of charity.

Also, I'm dead. The curse has come upon me, as the Lady of Shalott cried, only she wasn't in any danger of getting pregnant. I can eat, or I can sleep. Or I can gag. I'm not very interesting company. What I need to do is, I need to walk, but at any given moment it 's not the most appealing option. All this new life is killing me.

I was talking to my eight-year-old son about how he was going to be the middle child when baby comes, and I thought that back when I was pregnant with him, if you'd told me that I would be doing this three more times, I would have laughed with that little edge of hysteria. If you told me when I had my first that I would do this six more times (seven, counting the miscarriage, but I was never sick then), I would have turned my face to the wall and died. Death to self, indeed. I exist to serve this baby, to eat and sleep at its whims, to gag and mumble and assure myself, "I'm okay, I'm okay," so I can stave off the awful day of vomiting as long as possible.

But guess what doesn't bother me these days? Acedia! There's irony for you. Now I have a legitimate reason to not do anything. I don't hate the world, though people wear me out. Now I'm immersed in something bigger than myself (and believe me, soon there won't be many things bigger than I am). I don't feel wanderlust or dissatisfaction, or even the angst of having all my plans for the next year (or the next eighteen years) suddenly change on me. I'm in one of those stages where I can be pretty certain I'm doing God's will, even though there's not much active doing on my part. In my current existence, I'm doing God's will. Good to know.

***
I'm about 6.5 weeks along. The internet tells me that baby is between the size of a lentil and a blueberry. By eight weeks, baby will be the size of a grape. That's a lot of growing, and it takes a lot of protein.

I've gone mostly off sugar, because what I don't need right now are empty calories. I don't even want it. I have not snuck the Halloween candy, what's left of it. I turned down donuts. If it's not protein, don't even talk to me. In another age, I'd have gout.

I WANT TACOS, so badly. If we still lived in Texas, I would eat tacos every day, if someone would bring them to me. Tacos tacos tacos. Also, a hamburger. What keeps me from gorging myself is that it takes effort to go get food.

6 comments:

Also, I'm a firm believer in better living through chemistry. Zofran helped me survive two pregnancies, and Diclegis has helped me through three more. (Diclegis is better than the B6 + Unisom combo in many cases because it's a time release formula.)

The only thing I have to deal with when I'm pregnant is the shock folks have when they find out I'm in the third trimester, not just fat and out of shape in addition to the existing clumsy. (While nowhere near the starving but gagging stuff, or the "I can use my belly as a makeshift table" issue, it is not as awesome as you'd have thought.)

Oh my word, I do love to read a well-written piece about pregnancy. I will be following raptly these next far-too-many months. Writing got me through my last one. It was about all I could do, you know? And what I wanted wasn't tacos, but the southern BBQ baked beans we used to get at Sonny's restaurants. I checked the internet, but nope, they wouldn't mail-order to Canada. Stupid Sonny's. I would've made them rich.

Hi! I wrote to you privately a few months ago, asking about literature in middle-school and what you do after your kids read books. Yes? Well, I laughed myself silly at your pregnancy announcement, because I, too, am newly pregnant--and with #7, too! I'm about 10 weeks along, and hoping (hoping!!) the morning sickness/extreme exhaustion ends soon... I'll tell you: this pregnancy thing is much harder at 39 than it was at 29. And forget middle school literature--my goal these days is math-and-phonics. I've dispensed with history, science, narration... luckily, the first trimester ends about the same time as our second quarter, so hopefully we'll all get back to work after Christmas.

And as for going to get food, my sweet husband is willing to stop almost anywhere on his way home from work. It's hard to resist!

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